


the wilt before the bloom

by serendipitous_theodosia



Category: Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Genre: Character Study, Everyone Is Gay, Mentions of Rape, Multi, Requited Love, Unrequited Love, but anywayzzz i hope you enjoy:), can we tal about that, like comment and subscribeeeee, literally everyone fight me, self hatred, touga and utena are both gay u can fight me, touga gets his head out of his ass basically, touga is low-key rlly messed up tho like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:07:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22992946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serendipitous_theodosia/pseuds/serendipitous_theodosia
Summary: Touga throughout the stages of his life.
Relationships: Kiryuu Touga & Saionji Kyouichi, Kiryuu Touga/Ohtori Akio, Kiryuu Touga/Saionji Kyouichi, Kiryuu Touga/Tenjou Utena
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	the wilt before the bloom

saionji  
They were children when they met. Azure eyes chanced upon swirling green locks and thin lips drew into a scowl. He remembered tilting his head at the sight, his own mouth curving up ever so slightly.  
(There hadn’t been anyone interesting in ages. Perhaps this lanky boy with coarse hair and tension in his shoulders would serve as decent entertainment.) 

Years flashed by to the symphony of clashing wooden swords and seething words. (seething, yet Touga could hear the subtle adoration in Kyouichi’s sentences, could feel the tenderness of nimble fingers grazing his own accidentally. He was too young at the time to register the red dusted on his cheeks, too young to recognise the pang in his heart as anything other than overexertion.  
(But he wasn’t young enough to hear roses in Kyouichi’s name, to see God in the curve of his neck, the lilac of his eyes. He wasn’t young enough to want his hands to graze every inch of his companion, grasp at the music that was his breathing, and want to wrap his arms around this strange boy. A shield, an offering.)

He thought back on this often. The comfort of Kyouichi’s honeysuckle smile before his own incompetence soured it.  
(And yet, despite his benign adoration of Kyouichi, Touga could not reconcile his soft gaze with cabbage butterflies, suffocating bed sheets. A part of him wondered if this was all love could be, if eternity was only achieved in the form of unwanted scrutiny and slimy, selfish desires. How could it be the same, he wondered? How could kendo matches and pristine white bandages be the same as cabbage fields and his own long red hair?  
Perhaps that’s why he couldn’t be around him without a nauseating awareness plaguing his stomach.)

(“There is no such thing as something eternal.”)  
utena  
He was popular with the ladies. The lessons his stepfather embedded in him manifested in his idle courtings, girls throwing themselves at his feet in devotion and infatuation. They were all bland in their own trite way, but he was able to cultivate the image of a prince under the layers upon layers of his hair as well as the grime on his skin. (He built a destiny for himself by murmuring the same words into every lovesick girl who crossed his path. They made a mockery of his pain, saw beauty when there were only scars. It was only fair he treated them as they treated him. A concept, an idea, the very thing he wants to embody but shied away from every time those words fell from their lips.  
Where was Saionji?)

In her, he saw eternity. The girl in the coffin, silky strands of pink sliding through his fingers while death permeated her physicality, was rescued by a prince.  
(Seeing her in that coffin was the beginning of the end, the ideals of fairytales finally sinking into his faraway fantasies of freedom and peace. He had imagined Saionji in the castle with him, but as his hair grew longer and eyes became duller, he wondered if he should want a princess.)

She had seen eternity and had been saved, divinely prompted and guided into the role of a duelist because of her willpower and devotion to the one that rescued her.  
(A part of him simmered at the thought, the idea that you could be saved. He had spent so much of his youth beneath bedsheets, beneath powerful hands that he had given up on the idea of eternity in its entirety. But she was hope, and she was blinding, adoring her only made sense right? She was the picture perfect princess placating herself as a prince. Of course it would make sense to love her.)

If he must be with any girl, it would be her. Clad in her boyish outfit, her boyish appearance, and her boyish demeanour. (He was older. He knew what was expected of him. She was safe, skirting the lines between prince and girl, so much so that the coiling sickness in his stomach could be satiated by her. If he couldn’t have what he wanted, what he truly wanted, then perhaps he could build a home in her.)

(“Do you love her?” Saionji asked, in such a way Touga’s heart clenched painfully, the words feeling wrong on his tongue.  
“It‘s obvious I care for her deeply.” He said instead, unable to meet his gaze. Instead he smiled, put on the lapels and crown of a prince, “That’s why I must fight her.”)

He knew his symbol was a red rose, but as he went to challenge her, his hands seemed to drift to green.

akio  
He had saved him from the darkness that threatened to consume him. Clad in white, lilac in his uneven locks, he extended sienna fingers to him. Perhaps it was because he appealed to Touga’s sense of dramatics, perhaps it was because his cellidone eyes spoke of false promises and deceit, all of the things he’d grown accustomed to. But even as white fangs alluded to more of a snarl than a smile, he felt heat in his stomach as their hands intertwined. (This was familiar, in a way. Comfortable. His throat closing as flashing lights illuminated a stomach, a neck, a chest. Sparks flying painfully at fingers against his cheek. Pushing down the pit in his stomach, the alarm bells blaring in his ears, stop stop stop stopstopstop-)

After, he stared at his face, the gossamer of his own hair blood against Akio’s cheek. This was the prince, this man who’s eyes held centuries upon centuries, but who’s light flickered out a long time ago. (He was used to empty men.)  
Akio blamed the witch for his growing pains, for the power of revelation leaking out of his bones. Affirmations of the endless bliss that came from the castle and resided in the Rose Bride was delivered with beautiful silvery sentences with only the slightest strain. He knew that strain fondly and found solace in the mirror he provided. Told himself he wasn’t being used. He came to him in person and only him. Even if he was corrupted, even if he was the End of the World, salvation in power dripped from every orifice of his being. Touga found he turned away from the idea of eternity but let himself drown in coveting power. (And wasn’t that the true irony? That he would get a twisted version of the miracle bestowed upon her, a corruption of the ideals he tried so desperately to mask himself in? Didn’t that show what he was? What was the opposite of a princess?)

He slipped easily into the role of a puppeteer. Dangling his fellow duellists on silvery strings, reciting lines he didn’t believe until the emptiness he concluded Akio satiated grew deeper and deeper. He was used to manipulation, but he wasn’t used to this, to seeing the innocence of his classmates dissolving in this falsified adulthood. (He has looked at his hands, traced the lines of his palms and forced down his bile with a seductive look and a smile. He wondered if this made him a hypocrite, leading them down the same path he had protected Nanami and Saionji from when they were children. He wondered if there was anything left in him at all.)

Perhaps a part of him hoped his miracle of ambition and power would be realised at the hands of his mentor. That this was all worth it, that his past, that butterflies, that constriction meant something other than being weak. He wanted to believe he was striving towards his own goals, that playing Akio’s game willingly gave him the upper hand. But instead, his right to play had been revoked, replaced with rose scented chains. (“You’re his little lapdog.” Saionji said, voice airy and unassuming. The lilac of his eyes narrowed, keenly prying through all the masks Touga draped himself in. Aging suited him, the lines between his brow indicative of the revolution that happened within his companion, “Are you really content with that? Why do you serve him the way you do?”  
“Because he saved her a long time ago.” He said, surprised at his own truthfulness, “I want to be like him. I want the power he has.”

His gaze was steady, unnerving clarity unfolding within it, “Maybe he saved her at one point, but she’s still trapped in her coffin. All of us are.”)

saionji  
He had perfected the art of playing this game, a misdirection here, a malignantly delicate whisper there, pawn to e8. Saionji had acted as a bishop for so long he was surprised he hadn’t fallen off the chess board. (He was his oldest and closest friend, close with thick walls in between. Touga convinced himself that it was because he despised the other, saw weakness in his stupid dreams of eternal friendship, as he acted like a wounded dog biting at its owner. But a part of him will always be painfully aware that his feet always lead to where Saionji was, that he didn’t know how to love other than to hurt. He needed control and he needed him, so how else would he make sure Saionji stayed arms length apart while still keeping a firm grip? All of the walls and masks and barriers only acted as a security measure to make sure he never saw him. The him with glassy eyes, his pieces irrevocably shattered. The him who was desperate for his touch, but hated himself too much to ever believe that Saoinji could see him and would stay. How could he ever stay? Why was he still here?)

He had thought his loyalty was spent, that his friend would wisen up and leave Ohtori, leave the duels, leave him. That the memory of sunlit eyelashes and tender competition would be smothered beneath his sharp half truths and the taste of bitter ash on their tongues. But here he stood, after Touga confessed his love to her, still stubbornly and stupidly clinging on despite all the pain he put him through. He was a fool.

(But he was Touga’s fool.)  
“Is it over for us?” Kyouichi exhaled, curtains of green curls caressing his cheeks and intermingling with red, eyes twinkling with a newfound freedom, tired yet relieved. (He had always been beautiful, in a coarse way. The sun caught the angles of his cheeks, the sharpness of his eyes. There was nothing fragile about him, and yet his voice was feather-light. Innocent. His stomach flipped, as he kept his eyes trailing on the clouds. Different from the hole that burrowed into his ribs.)

“No. It won’t be over until we see the very end.”  
The weight of unspoken words hung low in the air and pressed against his chest like bricks. His fingers twitched, and he inched his hand upward, only to be met with the feeling of nails against his skin. He flinched, before intertwining their fingers, Kyouichi acting as a constant. He allowed this indulgence, did not try to shove down the warmth in his cheeks or the release of tension in his shoulders. (They had always found a way back to one another, even through the haze of childlike stupor or acting in roles that never truly fit them. In the edges of his vision he saw the castle mirage, glittering and untouched in the wake of his defeat. He could not have power and he could not have control, but images of him and Kyouichi, not in a palace, but in a cottage flooded to him then. Neither of them were princes, and for once the thought didn’t bring a sour tang to his mouth. He was tired, so very tired, years of men etched into his skin as prominent as the bones protruding his flesh. Everything he had done felt so big, so unredeemable, he wondered if revolution could exist for someone like him. His head was filled with uncertainty of the unknown, and yet, somehow silenced at the gentle circles Kyouichi traced on his palm. This would have to be enough.

He had always been enough.)

**Author's Note:**

> this is one of if not the longest fan fiction I’ve ever written, idk if any of them are in character and if they not I’m sorry lmao. Please tell me your thoughts!!! I hate Touga sm, but he’s such a complex and interesting character I had to play around with him just a lil. I firmly believe he is gay™️ Oop. I will gladly go on a tirade on that lol, bUt pls for the love of god encourage more Touga/Saionji content I n e e d it ok I’m rambling hope you enjoyed bai!!


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